//------------------------------// // One // Story: With Her Majesty's Coast Guard // by SockPuppet //------------------------------// "Sister," Luna said, nodding as Celestia entered her chambers.  Raven Inkwell stood and bowed before silently disappearing out the back entrance. "How are Raven's language lessons going, Luna?" Luna's ears twitched and her feathers ruffled. She frowned. "I can speak modern Ponish if I take my time. Excitement or anger, and I still yet lapse." "You're still planning to attend Nightmare Night in Ponyville?" Luna looked at her calendar. A date next week was circled. "A few extra weeks to prepare for my reentry to society would be better, but yes." They stared at each other until Luna said, "Your face betrays unease." "Tomorrow is an event, Luna. I hate to ask you to perform Royal duties in public so soon, but I think it is important. You need only to stand at my side with austere silence and somber dignity. That is what I do, every year." "What event is this?" "The eight-hundred and ninety-first cohort of officer-cadets from the Coast Guard Academy will graduate and swear their oaths to the Crown. To the Crowns, now. It is important we attend." Luna frowned. "You showed me a tomb. A memorial, rather. You told me that my great-granddaughter...?" "The sea is harsh," Celestia continued. "The Coast Guard is the single most dangerous profession in Equestria. The officers and ponies will always sail to succor those in need, regardless of the risk to themselves. This tradition is ingrained as deep as bone, no matter the cost. The officer corps carries on your great-granddaughter's traditions, always leading from the front. The officers command not 'Go forward,' but instead 'Follow me,' as taught by the child of your bloodline. We, the Crowns, will bear witness to their valor, to honor those who will fall, and to remember those who have fallen, those who lived in accord with the tradition... the tradition tempered in your great-granddaughter's spilled blood." Luna swallowed twice, then nodded. "I shall go to bed early and be ready tomorrow."  The Coast Guard Academy sat on the edge of Manehattan Harbor, across from the city itself. Manicured drill fields surrounded brick buildings and a dense copse of tall oaks stood to the north of the buildings, the leaves red and orange with autumn. An ancient caravel, preserved as a museum ship, was tied to a dock, a line of tourists awaiting admission. Black letters on her stern proclaimed her the Dawn's Light. The two princesses walked along the paved path, their metal boots ringing against the stones. Formal couture and regalia, white and gold on one and blue and silver on the other, billowed in the wind. A black marble statue stood in the circle where the road met the main building. "My daughter's granddaughter?" Luna asked, looking at the statue. It was a tall mare, slim with aristocratic features, clearly a Canterlot noble, despite the wings and the lack of a horn. She was clad in a life jacket and helmet, tail and mane blown in the wind. She raised one hoof, pointing forward, and shouted over her shoulder, a snarl of determination on her face.  The plinth named the sculpture Follow me!  Celestia nodded. "I loved her. I miss her." "The marble is colorless. What did she look like?" "Dark blue, darker than you, all but black. The white socks and blaze that ran in your family for so many generations. Her wingtips were white, too. Her mane and tail were the gray of the northern seas tossed by a winter storm. From birth, she was gray, and earned much teasing. As the eldest of her generation, her siblings and cousins called her 'grandma,' even before they left the nursery." Celestia smiled. "It drove her mad." "Had I not made my mistakes, I would have known her." Celestia put a wing over Luna's back and hugged her. They entered the main foyer of the Coast Guard Academy, a grand marble-floored hallway a quarter-mile long and one story high. Autumn sunlight poured through the glass ceiling. The right wall was painted with murals and the left wall hung with small plaques. The polished granite lintel to the entrance was carved with the Coast Guard's sacred oath: We have to go out. We don't have to come back. Luna looked at the first mural. Seven small ships were tied alongside a single large one, bluffs and stone promontories looming in the mist beyond. Wind drove towering waves, snow and lightning surrounding them. The artist must have been the greatest master of her generation, for Luna smelled the salt and ozone. "Five hundred years ago," Celestia said, bowing her head momentarily to the mural. "During the Griffonstone Civil War, famine, cruelty, and the desperation of parents who wished naught but a better life for their chicks drove four thousand refugees onto a ship meant for four hundred. A storm pushed it onto rocks. Coast Guard Station Baltimare sortied every cutter it deemed seaworthy, and two it did not. Seventy-three ponies and sixteen officers—including the station's commodore—were killed by storm and sea. That price was horrible, but I name it worthy: three thousand, one hundred and twelve refugees were snatched from the maelstrom, mostly chicks too young and too malnourished to fly to safety. It was both the darkest and the brightest day in the Coast Guard's history. The descendants of the rescued griffons are now among Equestria's most loyal subjects. Not a small number will be in the graduating class today, for they hold their debt sacred, and its repayment the task of generations." Luna nodded, then walked to the opposite side of the foyer. The plaques were gold, silver, or brass colored, each about the size of two hooves placed together, the three colors about equal in number. The first plaque was brass. She read: Rescue Swimmer Rising Tide Fifty miles west-northwest of Vanhoover HMCGC Swiftsure 4th month, 12th day, Year 1093 "H-M-C-G-C?" Luna asked. "Her Majesty's Coast Guard Cutter." Her lip twitched into a tiny smile. "Perhaps they must be renamed Their Majesties', now."   "That date is from this spring," Luna said. "Does it mean what I fear?" "This is the Wall of Honor," Celestia explained, with a sweep of a wing. "Every pony or officer who fell in the line of duty is named here." Celestia sniffled and wiped her nose. "One thousand, three hundred, and twenty four names over almost a thousand years. One plaque is presently being fabricated by the artisans. Winter storm season approaches, and I fear they will have more work." Luna took a few steps and looked at a silver plaque that named a petty officer, killed a decade before.  "This is a place of great sadness." "The sea is harsh, but doctrine, technology, and training improve, century-over-century. The rate at which names are added is but a tiny fraction of the old days'. The ethos, the dedication, the sense of duty, the tradition, however, are no different from what your great-granddaughter created." Luna then looked at a gold plaque: Sub-Lieutenant Winter Storm Heiress, Duchy Cloudsdale HMCGC Indefatigable Twenty miles east of Baltimare Harbor The date was thirty years past. Luna was dumbstruck and needed half a minute to find words again. Her voice was raspy and quiet: "The heiress to a duchy died in the uniform of the Crown?" "Cloudsdale is the senior of all duchies in Equestria, ever since the Battle of Canterlot Bridge, nine hundred and ninety-six years ago." "You did not answer my question." "Many of our vassals are useless fops, and raise their foals to follow in their hoofsteps. Many more, thank goodness, have followed in the example of your daughters, and raise their foals with the sense of duty and obligation that their privileges deserve." "The heiress Cloudsdale was a mere sub-lieutenant?" "Winter Storm was twenty-one, only three months graduated from the Academy herself, on her first assignment. Her boat crew saved twelve lives. She died when she tried to make the number thirteen, and her crew failed to recover her body. She received the Coast Guard's highest decoration, the Valorous Lifesaving Medal..." Celestia turned away and wiped her eyes. "That medal is so damnably often posthumous... I have thanked far too many families for their sacrifice while giving them a folded Equestrian flag..." "What happened to the Cloudsdale succession?" "Her younger twin, Fire Storm, is now Duke Cloudsdale." "I've met him," Luna said, tapping a silver-shod hoof on the marble floor. "Raven introduced us, so I could practice my modern Ponish with one of your political allies, who would not go gossip to a newspaper." "Fire Storm's son and heir was in last year's graduating class, presently a sub-lieutenant aboard the cutter Typhoon."  "I recall Duke Cloudsdale's coat and feathers are pockmarked with burns and scars." "He commanded the Royal Forestry Service smokejumpers before his mother passed and he was called home to Cloudsdale to take up his fief." Luna slowly walked down the hallway, looking at the names. About one in six of the golden officers' plaques indicated the fallen had been either a peer or an heir. Indeed, she counted one duke and three duchesses, a dozen earls or countesses, and many lesser peers over the nine centuries of loss.  This memorial was soaked in blue blood. "Sister..." Luna whispered. "Sister, where is my great-granddaughter's name?" Celestia clenched her eyes and took a deep breath. "Her name is the very first." Luna raised her nose high, clenched her wings, and strode slowly, with as much regal dignity as she could muster, to the far end of the Wall of Honor, about a quarter of the way down the corridor. Midnight-blue silk rustled. Her breath rasped, burning down her throat like the blast of a blacksmith's forge, and the pounding of her heartbeat in her ears drowned out the echoing of the silver hoofshoes on the marble. Her stomach twisted, knotting up, and she feared she would vomit on her regalia as the terror swelled with every step closer to the end of the wall of plaques. She reached the end and looked at the plaque, at the top of the first rank of names, just above horn-height.  Her breathing slowed and her heartbeat came back under control. After more than nine hundred years, the gold was dingy from the smoke of candles and the dust of ages. Luna's horn lit. She cleaned the plaque until it gleamed. It was no larger or more ornate than any of the thousands of others in the hallway. Without reading it, one would have never known it remembered somepony unusual: Vice Admiral Gale Glider Princess of the Blood HMCGC Dawn's Light Pone Island Sound, just northeast of Manehattan Harbor 23rd day, 10th month, Year 178 "Today is the anniversary of her fall," Luna observed sadly.  "Graduation is always today. The tradition is inviolable." "An admiral at age forty?" Luna asked. "In those early days, I had few allies, and even fewer I could trust without reservation. I leaned heavily on your children, and mine." Celestia's ears drooped and her tail thrashed. "Far too many of them died as I forged Equestria. I treated them as a blacksmith treats her anvil. I have never forgiven myself, because they thanked me for my trust and basked in the honor of being used and broken." "I have never seen your judgment in error, Sister. And this Equestria you forged without my assistance is testament to your choices.' Celestia looked away, then up at the ceiling, her voice weak. "History remembers my triumphs and forgets my mistakes. But I remember." The princesses sat in a raised box at the back of the ceremony. One hundred and fifty-one officer-cadets, mostly ponies but including sixteen griffons, four donkeys, one zebra, and two mules, all resplendent in tailored black-and-jade dress uniforms, sat stiffly in folding chairs, their families in bleachers to their left. Three Peers of the Realm—a countess and two barons—could be recognized among the parents and grandparents. "Now," Celestia whispered to Luna, about a half-hour into the ceremony, "for the Coast Guard's most solemn tradition." "Indeed?" "The senior non-commissioned officer in the service has the honor of reading the story of the Service's founding. Generally, their last duty before a well-earned retirement. The words are translated, every few decades, into modern Ponish, but every word of the story is true, for I made sure it was vetted and verified while survivors' memories were still fresh, and it made use of Gale's letters and diaries." "The story of my child's grandchild," Luna said. Celestia wanted to hug her sister, for Luna was shaking, but the dignity of the ceremony prevented the gesture.  Celestia then hugged her anyway, wrapping a wing around her, and Luna buried her face into Celestia's neck. A grizzled mare in the uniform of a command master chief walked to the podium, a thin hardbound book tucked under her wing. She placed the book on the podium, shuffled her wings, and then began to read in a loud voice.  The kind of voice that was trained to carry over the bedlam of storm, sea, and panic, snapping a rookie crew to their Duty to the Crown and to the Tradition of the Service. The kind of voice that went out, with no mind paid to the odds of coming back.